Realism

In this article originally published by Christianity and Crisis on March 18, 1946, Charles W. Gilkey warns Americans not to worry that helping people abroad will make them “suckers.”

“A Christian knows, or ought to know, that an adequate Christian political ethic is not established merely by conceiving the most ideal possible solution for a political problem. He must, in all humility, deal with the realities of human nature, as well as the ideal possibilities.”

It is childish to demand the real world conform to one’s fancy; it is childlike to learn about the real world by playing in an imaginary one. Both the idealist and the cynical realist are childish. The Christian realist, by contrast, should be childlike.

A national conservative foreign policy welcomes institutions for international cooperation, so long as they remain voluntary pacts between the participating nations, and do not morph into efforts at establishing supranational governance.

Followers of Christian realism generally share these eight assumptions, which can be found in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and others.

Charlie Laderman’s “Sharing the Burden” provides a thoroughly researched and highly compelling account of how the Armenian question acted as a catalyst for an emerging American-British geopolitical alliance and the United States’ rise as a predominant actor in the international arena.

Realism and the just war ethic both pursue war in certain contexts, so they can appear to be close cousins. But the just war ethic shares less with realism than realism shares with pacifism.

Though the Bible does not give us a clear schematic of how we are to order our political life, it does something more profound: it gives us a frame for all reality, history, and humanity.

It is interesting to reflect when a topic bursts into public view and comes to dominate public discussion: Why nationalism now?